Suddenlink Cable Subscribers in Charleston Get Improved WV PBS Service

Charleston, W.Va. -- March 27, 2014 -- West Virginia Public Broadcasting made significant improvements to how Suddenlink Cable subscribers in Charleston will receive the WV PBS signal.

Until this past week, Suddenlink picked up West Virginia PBS programming "off-air," meaning the cable company used a receiver and antenna to deliver the signal to customers. This type of delivery is fragile and prone to signal interruptions, causing outages and pixelation.

To alleviate this problem, West Virginia Public Broadcasting engineers designed and installed a direct feed from the station's headquarters in Charleston to the Suddenlink facility. In addition, there are now two backup delivery options in place that will automatically kick in should the primary signal feed fail.

"Our testing of failure modes demonstrates a slight pause of approximately one second during a switch," said Scott Finn, executive director of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. "Many viewers will not even be aware of it occurring. This is in contrast to outages of many minutes or hours of glitching and audio static bursts.